Please welcome AOL Music into the MetaBrainz ecosystem!

The continued economic turmoil persisted in 2012 and thus it was a slow year for adding new customers for MetaBrainz. However, we did add one high profile customer in 2012: AOL Music.

For a number of reasons we felt that it was prudent to get MusicBrainz integrated into AOL before making public news about it. Now the time is finally right to talk about our relationship with AOL and Winamp. I had been talking to Geno Yoham (GM of Winamp) and Lisa Namerow (GM of AOL Music) about MusicBrainz at various conferences for several years. Forging relationships with large companies take a quite a long time and the formation of our relationship was really no different. At the end of 2011 Geno, Lisa and team were ready to take action and surprised me by pledging a sizeable donation to the MetaBrainz Foundation. This donation was received early in 2012 about the same time that we signed the data license contract. And just last week we received another donation for 2012!! Thanks AOL and Winamp!

The Now Playing feature in Winamp allows a user to find out more about the artist that is currently playing in Winamp.

The AOL Music Artist pages also use MusicBrainz data to display discography information and to provide some of the links for the other content shown on those pages.

Our relationship with AOL follows a similar pattern to our relationship to the BBC. The BBC has done wonders for highlighting and lending credibility to MusicBrainz and I expect that our relationship with AOL will bring about similar benefits for MusicBrainz.

Thank you team AOL and especially to Geno Yoham and Lisa Namerow for believing in us!